Just so long as it comes from a sustainable, eco-friendly farm like Mr Main’s Cootamundra property. 

“The most vegan food you could eat is grass fed beef,” he said, in response to a recent international study spearheaded by Oxford University.

Mr Main and others involved with the Riverina’s Land To Market sustainable farming coalition take umbrage with the study which concludes veganism is the best way to achieve a sustainable planet.

The survey, published earlier this month in the journal Science suggested that meat and dairy farming has a higher impact on the earth than plant crops. It found that up to 60 per cent of greenhouse gases come directly from livestock farming.

Applying the same conditions to a fictitious vegan population, the researchers concluded that emissions would be cut down by 75 per cent if all the worlds farmers converted to plant crops.

Mr Main is concerned the Oxford University study took a generalised and simplistic approach to livestock farming, by assuming a majority are monoculture paddocks, which he describes as “the worse case scenario”.

“I don’t approve of raising just one [species of] animal or plant on a paddock, it’s much better to work with nature and raise the kinds that complement each other,” he said.

More broadly, Mr Main is of the opinion that you can have your cow and eat it too.

“There’s a lot of problems with the vegan argument,” he said.

“Cropping for plants tends to involve high impact techniques, like killing everything in the paddock so that you can grow one plant [crop] for a season.

“That way, the farmer is killing anything that tries to compete with [the crop].

“That kind of cropping adds a lot of carbon to the environment, and if it’s using tractors then there’s a lot of diesel fumes too. The fertiliser used for heavy plant crops releases nitrogren as well. So it can become just a wasteland of chemicals.

“The worst thing to do is destroy the environment that animals live on so that you can produce soy, or something like that. It’s not a holistic management of the land that promotes the health of the ecosystem.”

Being an international study, Mr Main also does not believe much of the survey’s approach is relevant to the conditions in the Riverina.

“The other issue is that so much land is not suitable for cropping, and so the only way to produce on that land is to graze animals that convert food we can’t use – like trees and grass – into the food we can – meat.”

“It’s the way nature works as a complementary relationship of animals an plants. In the wild, animals eat plants, other animals eat those animals, then they die and are eaten by bugs.

“Veganism has no interaction between animals and humans, breaking that link and destroying biodiversity in the process.”

For Mr Main, the problem is not the farm’s produce, but rather how it is managed to avoid over-grazing.

“I have cattle that I move regularly so that plants can regrow,”

“Not over-grazing by moving cattle improves the plants that are grown, and improves the soil biodiversity.”

There is one point of the study that Mr Main does agree upon. Farming, he believes, should promote biodiversity, microfauna and the production of soil carbon.

“Bad agriculture releases carbon. Proper gracing helps pull excess carbon from the air, and puts it in the soil which increases biodiversity and results in cleaner water and less flooding over time.”

“It can actually make the farm more profitable and the product better when the soil and animals are managed well,” he said.

A commonly raised objection to this type of farming is that it requires more land to move animals around. Mr Main however says the process needn’t be unaffordable.

“A lot of beef and wool farmers are actually finding that it can cost less to look after the land because there’s fewer high cost inputs to outlay,” he said.

“It just costs a bit of time in planning, management and movement.”

Right now, Mr Main is converting part of his paddock that had been previously leased as a monoculture pasture.

It has not cost him financially, but he says the damage to the land will take between three and four years to rejuvenate.

“I don’t have to buy equipment or chemicals, I just have to set up fences and make sure there’s enough water for cattle, so it costs significantly less,” he said.